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Assume the person reading your resume is a Monkey

The title of this Blog is a bit insulting and rightly so. It is meant to get your attention so that you do not pass over the article – – to make you take notice!!!

If you were driving down the street and you saw a Billboard but you couldn’t make out what it said because the words were too small and the message was hidden in a thousand words, you would probably not understand it or crash your car trying to figure it out.

But on the other hand, if it said “EAT AT JOE’S” there would be no mistaking the message.

So is my message when referring to your resume. If you were trying to show something to a monkey you wouldn’t do it quietly or subtlety. You would be obvious about what you were doing. You’d talk simple to a monkey — Monkey wants a Banana? Monkey wants a toy? — Straight forward and obvious.

So how does simple talk, monkey talk, apply to a resume?

As a recruiter when I am sent an unsolicited resume or one that just lands in my inbox without me asking for it, I read it quickly. I am looking for the general gist of what it is about. Do I have a job for this person now, later or never? If it is later, I take a minute to review it. If it is never I take even less time. The “now” resume I will read in detail.

But if it is not obvious to me what your resume is about, what you are looking for, what your skills are, I could easily pass you by. A candidate’s submission that could be a “now” resume can easily be missed.

Let’s take for example a resume from Joe who sells software to wireless clients. Joe’s resume needs to spell out who he’s selling to, how much he sold, how much his quota is and how he achieved or exceeded it. Plus, if Joe knocked it out of the park by hitting a quota of 150%, this statistic had better jump out on the resume, bold-faced and blazing across the top of the resume.

Having placed many sales people, I have learned the hard way that when the client throws the resume back in my face because this blazing info was not included. A sales resume is not the exception to the rule. Every resume needs a bold-faced listing. Show a little confidence in your resume. Speak out. It never hurts.

In my business, we are submitting resumes for specific jobs. That means we have job-specific specifications. In “monkey” terms, — state the obvious, say what you do, say it boldly, say it so that it’s obvious, meet the specifications, tell me what you do best, tell me what you have achieved that apes (mimics) the job-specific specifications — because if you don’t, your resume won’t be a “now” resume to anyone who reads it.

Companies speak in their own language or nomenclature. If you have the exact skills in your resume that meet the job-specific specifications, and you call these exact skills “email marketing” and the company calls it “viral marketing” or “ECRM Marketing”, change your verbiage to read what the company is asking for on your resume. Make it obvious

Make it so that a Monkey could figure out that you’re the one for the job!

When you give a resume to a company, either through a recruiter or directly, you do not see the path that your resume takes. Your resume can pass through an “applicant tracking system” that looks for specific keywords. This “monkey-like” system only reads for key words — no key words and the monkey understands nothing.

7 thoughts on “Assume the person reading your resume is a Monkey”

We can also safely assume that a monkey would want to hire other monkeys rather than human beings. So perhaps you’re saying that the idea of job competitions, and of working life in general, is to hide our humanity.